Annie Get Your Gun

Snow Angels ("SA"), a drama adapted for the screen and directed by David Gordon Green (an indie director known in indie circles for such indie fare as All the Real Girls and Undertow), is like the annoying-if-well-intentioned friendless kid in class. You want to be kind to him, but he just so completely lacks self-awareness and is so self-indulgent, that the best thing you can probably do is follow the old adage, "if you don't have anything nice to say…" Not that I can't find nice things to say about SA – we'll get to that in a bit – it's just that there are a lot of other things to say about this flawed film.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I am not familiar with the source material – a novel by Stewart O'Nan – so I cannot comment upon how faithfully the screen version hews to the original. SA presents the story of the interconnected lives of various residents of a small Canadian town. Arthur (Michael Angarano), a sweet high school band geek, finds hope amidst his parents' break-up in a relationship with new-girl-in-school Lila (Olivia Thirlby, who looks so cold during some of her scenes that I just wanted to make her some hot chocolate). Arthur's former babysitter, Annie (Kate Beckinsale), is trying to survive single motherhood following her separation from unstable, recently born-again religious fanatic Glenn (Sam Rockwell). And Annie's co-worker, Barb (Amy Sedaris), learns to transcend her anger to help her friend when own marriage to philandering Nate (Nicky Katt) turns rocky, due in no small part to Annie.

The film begins with a marching band rehearsal (featuring a cartoonish band leader) interrupted by the jarring echo of two gunshots. We are then immediately transported to "Weeks Earlier" as the film proceeds to fill in the story. Maintaining dramatic tension while using this type of flashback device is a challenging endeavor, and it's the rare movie that pulls it off successfully – Michael Clayton is the exception, not the rule. Suffice it to say that SA is no Michael Clayton. From the moment we were introduced to Sam Rockwell's over-the-top and uncontained Glenn, I had a very clear sense of how this all was going to play out, and it wasn't pretty. In fact, when the movie finally caught up with itself, I felt only relief at the sounding of the two gunshots, rather than any sense of sadness for the fate that befell their victims.

Along the same lines, I had a hard time caring about most of the characters, as there wasn't a whole lot to like or sympathize with. Five minutes after the film concluded, I couldn't remember Kate Beckinsale's character's name (Annie), which is either a sign that she wasn't much worth remembering or that I was dropped a few too many times on my head as a youngster. While the latter may be true, I'm fairly certain the former is accurate. Quite simply, I never bought Kate Beckinsale as her character – a small town waitress with no prospects beyond the hamster wheel of a life she found herself in. Beckinsale never fit in with the rest of the cast – she was too pretty, too polished and frankly, her perfect highlights were distracting. I found myself thinking on more than one occasion: a) I wonder how her character could afford such a fantastic color job; and b) who on earth could be so skilled at highlighting hair in this small town when everyone else was clearly coif-challenged (see, e.g., Amy Sedaris' Barb).

More than that, Annie just wasn't a very nice person. She lied, cheated with her friend's husband and flirted with Arthur, her former babysitting charge, just to feel better about herself with no care to how much of a tease she was to him. And she was a selfish mother, yelling impatiently at four-year-old daughter Tara at the slightest provocation. It didn't help matters that the little girl who played Tara was simply dreadful. This is not intended to be cruel, as children of that age don't really act, but rather are coached more than anything, and the little girl who played Tara (name intentionally omitted) was not well guided. There was nothing genuine about her scenes with either her mother or father and therefore it was even more difficult to care when climactic Tara-in-peril events unfolded.

Happily, there was one storyline that was perfectly lovely to watch unfold, that of the sweet romance between Arthur and Lila. Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby gave understated performances with layers and depth. Thirlby in particular, most recently seen as best friend Leah in Juno is a delight to watch on the screen, and I hope to see her in even more central roles in future films. Sedaris and Katt gave admirable performances despite being saddled with rather dreary characters. Beckinsale could take a page from Sedaris' lack of vanity in portraying her character – she disappeared into Barb.

SA concludes with the same static shots of the every day life in the town that flashed by at the top of the film, as if to indicate that despite the tragic events of the past 106 minutes, nothing changes, life goes on. And the final shot of the film, which I can only assume was meant to convey the same sentiment, was so abrupt as to feel silly. Thus, I cannot even recommend SA for a DVD rental. Maybe if you're on an international flight and your other choices are Lindsay Lohan's I Know Who Killed Me and Paris Hilton's The Hottie and The Nottie, then I'd say give it a go. It's not a terrible film, it's just not terribly good.